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Friday, March 9, 2012

Refuse to Rhyme "Freight" With Anything For Intention Of Achieving Humor / Catchy Title

I've been interested in the concept of Mel Bosworth's novel "Freight" for quite a time now. It's an homage to "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories that contributed greatly to the free-time reading I did in elementary school. Usually, I would choose the adventure that ended in violence of some kind, usually death as well. It was a morbid streak, but one I stuck to. I remember one trip to New York ending with my plunging down the steps of the Statue of Liberty. A grisly way to go.

Anyway, in the spirit of that style, Mel Bosworth has written "Freight." It is an enjoyable way in which to offer readers an either purely imagined or possibly born from something more autobiographical story of a first person narrator and his life's worth of experiences. This was especially useful for me as a book available on Kindle, since there were hyperlinks to each passage of inter-connectedness. And that's precisely how the novel functioned, at certain points throughout you'd see passages that were highlighted as hyperlinks and would either skip you ahead or return you behind to passages deemed relevant to one another by the author. It works. It works really well. Might be construed as a gimmick by some, but not me. Not when it's a gimmick that works really well (which is probably the rule to distinguish gimmick from effective / innovative literary device -- did you like it / how it was implemented?).

That'll be a rule. I think it might be my rule already, but now I'm stating it loudly and clearly, gimmick and innovative device are in the eye of the beholder.

I loved another frequent concept of "Freight" -- that you swallow up the people that come in and out of your life, and they, in turn, might likewise swallow you, thus adding freight each and every one of us. It's reminiscent of the "This American Life" episode in which Ira Glass interviewed a farmer who'd cloned his beloved steer, Chance. Chance was not the same after cloning. His new "self" was different, altered by something imperceptible. Second Chance was violent and mean, tore open the farmer's nut sack as a tragic, climactic turn of events. People might be so different over time that when a person was your best friend at one point (s)he might tear open your nut sack at a different time.

praise for what we do here

From Online University Lowdown - Bob Einstein’s Literary Equations : Like the maths and sciences, the best, most thorough examples of literary criticism require painstaking exploration and a detailed report of the findings – all of which blogger Matt Rowan delivers.

From The New Dork Review of Books - Matt Rowan writes one of the best, most intellectually intense amateur book blogs out there. Definitely a blog to check out if you miss your college literature survey courses.